Peter the Brazen Part 42

"Say, you young prize-fighter," he sputtered, "you drunk? Crazy? Or just temporarily off your nut? Who in thunder said anything about prolonging the agony? What agony are you talking about? Why the devil 've you been dodging me all over South China to-day? You dog-gone young wildcat, you! I've got an a.s.signment for you. The _King of Asia's_ wireless man is laid up in the Peak Hospital with typhoid. I want you to take her back to Frisco! Blast your young hide, anyhow!"

The wizen face of the girl's grandmother appeared in the hatchway. She seemed annoyed, angry. She said something in the Cantonese dialect, which Peter did not understand.

"A sampan is following," translated the girl in her tiny voice, "but we are nearly there. In a moment you will be safe."

"Where?" demanded Peter, staring over the red-faced man's shoulder for a glimpse of the other sampan.

"The _King of Asia_," she told him. "In a moment, _birahi_, in a moment."

Her tones were those of a little mother.

But Peter was staring anxiously into the red face, trying to decipher an explanation.

"I told the red-faced one to be here, too, at midnight," the girl was whispering in his ear. "He came. He is a friend. Your fears were wrong, _birahi_."

The sampan lurched, sc.r.a.ping and tapping along a surface rough and metallic.

The yellow face of the old woman again appeared in the hatchway. A bar of keen, white light thrust its way into the cabin. It came from somewhere above. No longer could Peter hear the groan and swish of the sweep, and the cabin no longer keeled from side to side. He guessed that the sampan was alongside.

The old woman motioned for him to come out.

"I am not coming aboard; I am going back to my hotel," said the red-faced man. "You will not leave this s.h.i.+p? You will promise me that?"

"I will promise," said Peter gravely. "You, I presume, are Mr. J. B.

Whalen, the Marconi supervisor?"

The red-faced man nodded. As if by some prearranged plan, Whalen, after slight hesitation, climbed out of the cabin, leaving Peter alone with this very small, very gentle benefactor of his. He wanted to thank her, and he tried. But she put her fingers over his lips.

"You are going to the one you love, _birahi_," she said in her tinkling little voice. "Before we part, I want you--I want you to----" and she hesitated. "Come now, my brave one," she added with an attempt at briskness. "You must go. Hurry!"

Peter found the side ladder of the _King of Asia_ dangling from the upper glow of the liner's high deck. He put his foot on the lower rung and paused. A vast number of apologies, of thanks and good-byes demanded utterance, but he felt confused. The slight relaxation of the past few minutes had left him exhausted, and his brain was encased in fog.

He remembered that the little maid from Maca.s.sar had wanted him to do something, possibly some favor. The glow high above him seemed to swim. His injured arm was beginning to throb with a low and persistent pain. And the climb to the deck seemed a tremendous undertaking.

"You were saying," he began huskily, as she reached out to steady the ladder. "You wanted me----"

"Just this, my brave one." And she reached up on tiptoes and kissed him ever so lightly upon his lips. "When you think of me, _birahi_, close your eyes and dream. For I--I might have loved you!"

Half-way up the black precipice, Peter stopped and looked down. For a moment his befuddled senses refused to register what now occupied the s.p.a.ce at the ladder's end.

The sampan was no longer there; another had taken its place, a sampan long and as black as the night which encompa.s.sed it.

Wide, dark eyes stared up across the s.p.a.ce into his, and these were set in a chalky-white face, grim, fearful--startling!

It was Romola Borria. Her white arms were upheld in a gesture of entreaty. Her lips were moving.

Peter descended a step, and stopped, swaying slightly.

"What--what----" he began.

"He is dead!" came the whisper from the small deck. "I killed him! I killed him! Do you hear me? I am free! Free! Why do you stare at me so? I am ready to go. But you must ask me! I will not follow you. I will not!"

And Peter, clutching with a sick and sinking feeling at the hard rope, found that his lips and tongue were working, but that no sound other than a dull muttering issued from his mouth. Momentarily he was dumb--paralyzed.

"I am not a tool of the Gray Dragon," went on the vehement whisper. "I am not!"

And to Peter came full realization that Romola Borria was lying, or endeavoring to trick him, for the last time.

"Go back--there," he managed to stammer at last. "Go back! I won't have you! I'm through with this d.a.m.ned place."

Painfully he climbed up a few rungs.

Then the voice of Romola, no longer a whisper, but loud, broken, despairing, came to him for the last time:

"You are leaving me--leaving me--for her--for Eileen!"

Peter made no reply. He continued his laborious climb; first one foot, then a groping few inches upward along the hard rope with his right hand, and then the other foot. Nor did he once again look down.

He finally gained the deck. It was blazing with incandescent and arc-lights. Under-officers and deckhands were pacing about, giving attention to the loading. Donkey engines hissed, coughed, and rattled, as the yellow booms creaked out, up and in with their snares of bales and crates which vanished like swooping birds of prey into the noisy hatchways.

Peter took in the bustling scene with a long sigh of relief. He still heard that lonely, anguished voice; the black sampan still rested on his eyes, heaving on the flood tide upon which the great s.h.i.+p strained, as if eager to be gone. And out there--out there--beyond the black heart of mystery and the night, was the clean dawn--the rain-washed s.p.a.ces of the s.h.i.+mmering sea.

But he could not look down again. He would not. For a while--or forever--he had had his fill of China. Before him now lay the freedom of the open sea, the suns.h.i.+ne of life--and his homeland!

Peter the Brazen had drunk all too indulgently at the bitter fountain.

CHAPTER XVI

In the months which had pa.s.sed since their romantic parting on the bund at Shanghai, Peter the Brazen had founded all of his roseate notions of Eileen Lorimer upon the one-sided data furnished by those spirited few hours.

He had thought of her as a lonely little creature, sole inhabitant of a world apart, to which he would some time go and claim her.

He had not taken into his calculations at any time such prosaic objects as parents, brothers, sisters, and, more vital than all, other young men who might have found the same qualities in Eileen to adore as had attracted and bound him.

When, from a long-distance telephone-booth in the Hotel St. Francis, he finally was connected with the Lorimer residence in Pasadena, it was to hear the gruff, masculine accents of a person who claimed to be her father, and who was brusque and impulsive in his inquiries regarding Peter's ident.i.ty.

Peter did not know, or realize, that Mr. Lorimer would have willingly cut off his right hand for the young man who had restored his daughter to him nearly a year before. He was simply struck more or less dumb, with a schoolboy sort of feeling, when he was aware that, five hundred miles overland, a gruff father wanted righteously to know his business.

By adroit parrying, without giving out his ident.i.ty, Peter at length secured the information he wanted. Romola Borria had been truthful; Eileen was attending the university at San Friole.

With her San Friole address jotted down in the back of his red note-book, Peter endeavored to be connected with Miss Lorimer by telephone. After a trying pause the long-distance operator advised him that the residence in question did not possess a telephone.

Quartering what remained of his capital by the costly Pasadena call, Peter resorted to the telegraph stand, and waited in the lobby for an answer.

The first of the several bits of unpalatable news he was to be given during the day was delivered to him as he waited, when, unnoticed at first, a Chinese gentleman, a Mr. San Toy Fong, a pa.s.senger from Shanghai on the _King of Asia_, came out of the dining-room and occupied a chair at his side, cordially and candidly revealing an ident.i.ty which Peter had suspected during the entire voyage.